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The myth of Snow Leopard

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Re: The myth of Snow Leopard

#81

Post by reisse »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #57
LegNeato wrote: post #40

Oh, this again. I should put a website with this up... I was the person who personally ran 10.6 security updates at Apple (10.6.1+), the "DRI". My team in the Updates Program office and I reviewed every single bug to determine if it should go in a security and stability update or wait for the next major version. Seriously, every morning we group triaged all Mac OS X bugs, both incoming and those nominated internally…

> That would be the case with every y.0 vs x.8. There was something else going on during that time period though. Consumer operating systems in the 1990s were pretty bad. Windows 9x and MacOS Classic didn't even have protected memory. They crashed a lot. Microsoft fixed this with Windows NT (delivered to consumers as Windows XP), Apple with BSD/NeXT (delivered as OS X). It was the point when ordinary people first got…

The impression of XP being the best version of Windows came after at least two service packs (patch bundles / minor releases, for those unfamiliar) and the Vista shitshow. First Windows release that was good from the very beginning was 7.

Re: The myth of Snow Leopard

#82

Post by hotdogandchips »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #57
LegNeato wrote: post #40

Oh, this again. I should put a website with this up... I was the person who personally ran 10.6 security updates at Apple (10.6.1+), the "DRI". My team in the Updates Program office and I reviewed every single bug to determine if it should go in a security and stability update or wait for the next major version. Seriously, every morning we group triaged all Mac OS X bugs, both incoming and those nominated internally…

> That would be the case with every y.0 vs x.8. There was something else going on during that time period though. Consumer operating systems in the 1990s were pretty bad. Windows 9x and MacOS Classic didn't even have protected memory. They crashed a lot. Microsoft fixed this with Windows NT (delivered to consumers as Windows XP), Apple with BSD/NeXT (delivered as OS X). It was the point when ordinary people first got…

Without protected memory, if an application crashed you’d have to hard restart. I lost so much work in the 90s/2000s. Great times!

Re: The myth of Snow Leopard

#83

Post by lurkerforawhile »

giantfrog wrote: post #12

I have great memories of Snow Leopard. It even gave you back a few GB of storage (IIRC) at a time when every GB really counted.

fond fond fond memories of Snow Leopard. I was just a kid back then, so I guess I missed the complaints that people are mentioning here, but even back then no shiny new features but an improved and refined product seemed like a good/brave idea. something I'd like to see more of.

Re: The myth of Snow Leopard

#84

Post by latexr »

LegNeato wrote: post #40

Oh, this again. I should put a website with this up... I was the person who personally ran 10.6 security updates at Apple (10.6.1+), the "DRI". My team in the Updates Program office and I reviewed every single bug to determine if it should go in a security and stability update or wait for the next major version. Seriously, every morning we group triaged all Mac OS X bugs, both incoming and those nominated internally…

> If you wanted to ship a feature you had to get explicit approval from leadership and the bar was high.

What was defined as a feature? The first new thing I noticed in Snow Leopard was that Quick Look could now preview Adobe Illustrator files (it was not the case in Leopard). I very much welcomed that, but it doesn’t seem like the kind of feature addition that would clear a high bar.

Re: The myth of Snow Leopard

#85

Post by lapcat »

giantrobot wrote: post #52
LegNeato wrote: post #40

Oh, this again. I should put a website with this up... I was the person who personally ran 10.6 security updates at Apple (10.6.1+), the "DRI". My team in the Updates Program office and I reviewed every single bug to determine if it should go in a security and stability update or wait for the next major version. Seriously, every morning we group triaged all Mac OS X bugs, both incoming and those nominated internally…

Yeah as someone else that worked on Snow Leopard I found this article and ones like it a bit silly. They're a lot like the old "debug code" posts on Mac forums back in the day trying to explain why Puma was slow (no, you've got a G3 and an unaccelerated video card). Tiger and Leopard were sprawling releases. Tiger covered 32-bit and 64-bit PowerPC, then 32-bit x86, then 64-bit x86 Macs. Tiger was also what I guess I'…

> 10.6.3 (the second disc pressing IIRC) and onward were very stable.

10.6.3 actually introduced a CFNetwork/NSURLConnection crash with HTTP 301 redirects that plagued many people including me and lasted way too many OS X updates afterward. (This was originally Radar 7816615, now FB6066729, see also https://openradar.appspot.com/7841731)

Re: The myth of Snow Leopard

#86

Post by ndiddy »

frollogaston wrote: post #78
delta_p_delta_x wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vista wasn't garbage. In fact, Vista and 7 precisely parallel Leopard and Snow Leopard both in timelines and in release quality—a somewhat rushed, haphazard release of a new OS with tons of new features, many of which were considerably more resource-intensive than the previous release. 7 was more or less Vista SP3. The design language didn't even change except the Start bar. People had bad experiences on Vista becaus…

I had a brand new PC that came with Vista on it, it was terrible. Not just slow but also BSODs and bad UI. School PCs were higher end than mine but also had BSODs.

The BSODs were largely because Vista changed the driver API so everybody had to write new drivers. I remember seeing an article saying that Microsoft's telemetry showed that ~30% of all Vista BSODs were caused by the nVidia graphics driver. Windows 7 came out a few years later with the same driver API, so by then everybody had gotten most of the kinks worked out of their drivers.

Re: The myth of Snow Leopard

#87

Post by flyingshelf »

Any change is a breaking change. The release cleaned things up, this inevitably led to deprecated parts being dropped and unwanted/undefined/outdated behavior being changed.

Just because it's marked as "no feature" it doesn't mean it was a "no user changes" release.

Re: The myth of Snow Leopard

#88

Post by projektfu »

ndiddy wrote: post #9
mymacbook wrote: post #2

I don’t necessarily agree with Jeff Johnson’s conclusion that major software upgrades are impossible on an annual schedule. I also don’t know what he’s looking for, as someone who worked at Apple during this time quality improved substantially in 10.6 Snow Leopard and continued. Most bug fixes don’t get a marketing line item or even much fanfare. We were all users of what the OSX guys were doing and lived on the dogf…

> I don’t necessarily agree with Jeff Johnson’s conclusion that major software upgrades are impossible on an annual schedule. Snow Leopard was a refinement of Leopard, and both releases had unusually long durations as the newest release of Mac OS X, totaling 4 years. It then continued getting security updates until late 2013, another 2 years after Lion replaced it. I can see how people would treat the later point rel…

Honestly, the only reason why my new laptop was a Mac was because I couldn't get a comparable one without a Copilot button. I use both control keys.

Yes, I know about system 76 and framework, but they're not what I was looking for.

Re: The myth of Snow Leopard

#89

Post by 1over137 »

gregoriol wrote: post #79
LegNeato wrote: post #40

Oh, this again. I should put a website with this up... I was the person who personally ran 10.6 security updates at Apple (10.6.1+), the "DRI". My team in the Updates Program office and I reviewed every single bug to determine if it should go in a security and stability update or wait for the next major version. Seriously, every morning we group triaged all Mac OS X bugs, both incoming and those nominated internally…

From years of experience with Apple software, I'm never installing any y.0

From years of experience with all software, I'm never installing any y.0
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